What is Organic SEO?
Posted by Tracey Sandilands on Mon, Jan 23, 2012
Organic SEO is the unpaid optimization of content for search engine indexing purposes, so
that sites such as Google, Yahoo and others used to search for information can find it easily and show it in their search results. This is the opposite of paid search, which enables websites to achieve high rankings by paying for impressions or the number of times the website link shows up, as well as for conversions, which refers to click-throughs.
Organic SEO works by having a website that conforms to the rules of the algorithms used for search ranking.
Organic and Ethical
Truly organic content is much more than that, however. Just as the term “organic” in foods and other materials refers to an ethical and natural way in which an item is raised, nourished and treated, in search it has similar connotations. Practicing organic SEO means providing a website that:
If your site does all this, it will enjoy optimal rankings in unpaid, organic search results.
Old Ways
At one time, all that was needed to get your site found by the search engines was to “stuff” the copy full of keywords, whether it made sense or not, and update your website every now and again. Further in the past, webmasters could practice cloaking and stealth methods such as writing keywords in white font in the margins of web pages. These words could not be seen by users, but would be found by search engines and help to achieve a high ranking. Nowadays, search engines are mostly able to detect efforts to trick them and have tightened up processes to prevent low quality websites being ranked high on the results.
Quality Content
Google’s recent Farmer update, also known as Panda, was a radical step taken by the search giant to protect users from low quality results. The update forced websites to review their published content in terms of quality of the writing, plagiarism or duplication of content from other sites, and unsavory practices such as cloaking and stealth. This was a tremendous blow to content mills, many of which had multiple articles on similar topics published on their sites to provide platforms for online advertising, affiliate links and back linking to other pages.
Since the update’s implementation, Google’s first few pages of search results only show websites that are using good organic content practices. This has resulted in websites scrambling to rewrite their content, check for duplication and other no-nos, and organic content production has become a viable business in its own right.
Real Value
Organic SEO relies heavily on the use of best practices, as opposed to various schemes used by many Internet sites. A website with good quality organic content attracts links from other sites, which use it as a reference for their own content to enhance the user’s experience.
There is a big difference between attracting genuine links from other sites and participating in a linking scheme. Formerly, perfectly authentic websites could “swap” links with other sites, providing a link to the other site in exchange for a reciprocal link simply to help each website’s traffic and search rankings. Although the purpose of many commercial websites is to sell products, a site that provides real value to everyone – not only customers – will have better rankings in organic search.
Benefits
Some benefits of organic SEO are obvious; if it’s paid, it’s advertising. For the same reason that publicity carries far higher credibility than paid advertising, the assumption amongst savvy Internet users is that if the search engine can find you without being paid, the information must be good. This makes organic SEO results more trustworthy, relevant and longer-lasting compared with sponsored links that expire at the end of a paid contract. It’s cheaper, too, in the long term.
Although it may cost more initially to produce quality organic content needed for higher ranking, the payoff will be worth more than shelling out on cost per impression for less useful information. Paid search only provides ROI when impressions are converted into business, which doesn’t happen if the online information is worthless.
Organic SEO is therefore significantly important if you want to establish your business online, achieve credibility and solid search engine rankings, and turn your website into an authoritative, go-to source for your industry.